I have a 120GB Maxtor ATA drive that is not showing it's content!The drive is partitioned into 3 partitions with FAT32 formats. Today I was unable to access these drives. The HD with the three partitions is still recognized by my system, but on attempt to access them I am getting a message that the drives(Partitions) are not formatted. I don't know what happened, but I did have a problem with the middle partition losing format, and have I reformatted it in the past with Fat32 and NTSC systems, but it still failed a couple of times. Suspecting that the drive may go south I started backing-up some of the data on the partitions, but have not been able to finish it all.I know that all of the data is still on this drive, but I have no way of accessing it without the info tables. Is there somnething I can do to restore the format(Fat tables) to these partitions without doing an actual format and losing the data? Is there any kind of utility out there to pull the info off this drive? I don't want to pay to have the data restored by a professional lab, since the cost is very high! There is nothing on this drive that I couldn't live without, but there are lots of my personal pictures and files that I would really like to salvage! The irony is that this drive and partitions were mainly used for backup and archiving.Pete S.

It's not an inexpensive piece of software (US$69) but I think it's worth a look: http://www.runtime.org/ . (A Google search will undoubtedly find others.) There isn't much you can do without something like this if the FAT tables are gone. Doug

Thanks Doug, I will check it out.Pete S.

Why are you running FAT32 as opposed to NTFS?

Well I'm actually running NTSF on my other(new) system drives, as well as on the other drives on this computer. This was an older drive that I used as a third drive for archiving files, and I did not reformat it to NTSF.